War and violence — Eduqas GCSE English Literature C720
Eduqas GCSE English Literature · C720
War and violence
Themes
What you need to know
How Wells explores war, violence and their human cost, from the Heat-Ray and the Black Smoke to the battles on the Thames and at sea, and the trauma that lasts after the invasion across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'It was sweeping round swiftly and steadily, this flaming death, this invisible, inevitable sword of heat', 'charred and distorted beyond recognition', 'two women and a little boy, were crushed and trampled there', 'My imagination became belligerent, and defeated the invaders in a dozen striking ways', 'something of my schoolboy dreams of battle and heroism came back', 'Never before in the history of warfare had destruction been so indiscriminate and so universal', 'with the fore quarter of a horse atop of me', 'And the smell—good God! Like burnt meat!', 'Never since the devising of gunpowder was the beginning of a battle so still', 'And then night and extinction—nothing but a silent mass of impenetrable vapour hiding its dead', 'Sunday night was the end of the organised opposition to their movements', 'Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together', 'crumpled him up like a thing of cardboard', 'They gibber and grow fiercer, paler, uglier, mad distortions of humanity at last'.
Context: invasion literature after The Battle of Dorking (1871), which imagined Britain overrun by a German army, and the Thunder Child as a torpedo ram, a type of Victorian warship.
Different readings: the novel as a warning about modern weapons that kill civilians and soldiers alike, and as a picture of war's lasting effect on the mind.
